mwsnd-syllabus-2.0.0

 

 

Mobile Web Specialist   
Nanodegree Syllabus 
 Become a Professional Mobile Web Developer  

Before You Start 

Congratulations on considering the Mobile Web Specialist Nanodegree program! Before you get started, 
make sure to set aside adequate time on your calendar for focused work, and double-check that you meet 
the requirements: you should have prior programming experience that includes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript 
programming along with experience using Git and GitHub. 
 
The Mobile Web Specialist Nanodegree program is comprised of advanced web development curriculum 
organized into three parts and three projects. Each project you build will be an opportunity to demonstrate 
what you’ve learned. Your completed projects become part of a career portfolio that will demonstrate your 
mastery of mobile web development to potential employers. 
 
This Nanodegree program will transform intermediate front-end web developers into Mobile Web 
Specialists. By the time you graduate, you’ll be prepared for the Google Mobile Web Specialist Certification. 
If your goal is to get hired as a mobile web developer, this is the program for you. 
 
Prerequisites:  
You will need to be able to communicate fluently and professionally in written and spoken English. 
 
To enroll, you should have experience with the following courses or skills: 
Intermediate programming with JavaScript 
Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX)  
Git/GitHub 
Website Layout and HTML/CSS Design 
Command-Line Interface 
Experience designing and building web sites using JavaScript, HTML and CSS 
 
This course presumes extensive use of the JavaScript programming language. It is not an introductory 
development course.  
 
Educational Objectives:  
In this program, students will learn best practices for mobile development, and build a capstone project that 
clearly demonstrates relevant skills and unique vision as a developer. 
 
Length of Program*: ​240 Hours 

 

 
Textbooks required: ​None 
Instructional Tools Available:​ Video lectures, Mentors, Forums 
 
*The length is an estimation of total hours the average student may take to complete all required 
coursework, including lecture and project time. If you spend about 10 hours per week working through the 
program, you should finish in 24 weeks, so approximately 6 months. Actual hours may vary. 
 

  

 

 

Part 1: Building Accessible and Responsive Web Apps 

  Learning Outcomes 
Courses 

Responsive Web Design  ➔ In this course you'll learn the fundamentals of responsive web design with 
Fundamentals  Google's Pete LePage! You'll create your own responsive web page that 
works well on any device - phone, tablet, desktop or anything in between. 

➔ You’ll start by exploring what makes a site responsive and how some 
common responsive design patterns work across different devices. From 
there, you’ll learn how to create your own responsive layout using the 
viewport tag and CSS media queries. As you proceed, you’ll experiment 
with major and minor breakpoints, and optimizing text for reading. 

Responsive Images  ➔ Did you know that images account for more than 60% of the bytes on 

average needed to load a web page? 
➔ In this course you will learn how to work with images on the modern web, 

so that your images look great and load quickly on any device. 
➔ Along the way, you will pick up a range of skills and techniques to smoothly 

integrate responsive images into your development workflow. By the end 

of the course, you will be developing with images that adapt and respond 

to different viewport sizes and usage scenarios. 

Web Accessibility  ➔ In this course you’ll get hands-on experience making web applications 
  accessible. You’ll understand when and why users need accessibility. Then 
you’ll dive into the “how”: making a page work properly with screen 
readers, and managing input focus (e.g. the highlight you see when tabbing 
through a form.) You’ll understand what “semantics” and “semantic 
markup” mean for web pages and add ARIA markup to enable navigating 
the interface with a range of assistive devices. Finally, you’ll learn styling 
techniques that help users with partial vision navigate your pages easily 
and reliably. 

Project: Restaurant Reviews App—Stage One 

In this Nanodegree program, you will build a Restaurant Reviews App. To do this, you will incrementally 
convert a static webpage to a mobile-ready web application in three stages. In Stage One, you will take a 
static design that lacks accessibility and convert the design to be responsive on different sized displays and 
accessible for screen reader use. 

  

 

 

Part 2: Building Offline Capable Web Apps 

  Learning Outcomes 
Courses 

Asynchronous JavaScript  ➔ This course covers everything a developer needs to know to 
Requests  asynchronously send and receive data in their web applications. You'll 
dive into how asynchronous requests work by using the XHR object to 
create and send asynchronous requests for image and news article 
data. Then, you'll see how you can perform async requests more 
easily using third-party libraries and APIs like jQuery's Ajax and the 
Fetch API. 

ES6 JavaScript Improved  ➔ ECMAScript 6, or ES6, has brought about a ton of changes to the 
JavaScript programming language. In this course, you'll explore those 
changes to learn about the latest features and improvements to the 
language including new keywords, arrow functions, the Class syntax, 
Promises, and so much more. Discover how much cleaner and more 
concise your JavaScript code can be! 

Offline Web Applications  ➔ This course is focused squarely on user experience, and seeks to 
show developers how thinking offline-first is the best way to ensure 
that applications perform their best in all scenarios, not just ideal 
ones. You'll learn to recognize the differences between good, poor, 
intermittent, and missing connectivity for your users, and master how 
to make applications that navigate these conditions with ease. 

Web Tooling and Automation  ➔ In this course, you’ll learn how to setup your development, get super 
  productive during daily work and iteration, prevent yourself and your 
site from disasters and save a lot of time and effort with automatic 
optimization and automation. Finally, you’ll learn how to do all this 
while being confident your code runs on a multitude of devices in the 
real world. 

Project: Restaurant Reviews App—Stage Two 

In this Nanodegree program, you will build a Restaurant Reviews App. To do this, you will incrementally 
convert a static webpage to a mobile-ready web application in three stages. In Stage Two, you will be given a 
back-end server and the code from Stage One and add the ability to read JSON from the server and display 
this data in the app, store data in a database for offline use, and meet a site performance target.

  

 

 

Part 3: Building Performant Web Apps 

  Learning Outcomes 
Courses 

Client Server  ➔ We use websites all the time, but how does clicking a link in your 
Communication  browser or typing in a URL in the address bar get you to a website? 
How does the server know what information you're looking for or how 
to send you that information once it's figured that out? How can you 
protect your users from attackers?  

➔ This course will guide you through how a client communicates with a 
server. You'll learn about HTTP's request and response cycle, dig into 
HTTP headers and verbs, distinguish HTTP/1 from HTTP/2 capabilities, 
all while experiencing the importance of security by digging into the 
details of HTTPS. Throughout the course, you'll learn both security best 
practices, as well as ways to improve the performance of your web 
apps. We'll provide you with handcrafted servers where you'll diagnose 
problematic server setups, issues with SSL certificates, and even have a 
chance to hack an example bank website to transfer funds. 

Browser Rendering  ➔ Performance matters to users. Web developers need to build apps that 
Optimization 
react quickly and render smoothly. 
  ➔ Google performance guru Paul Lewis is here to help you destroy jank 

and create web apps that maintain 60 frames per second performance. 
➔ You'll leave this course with the tools you need to profile apps and 

identify the causes of jank. You'll explore the browser's rendering 

pipeline and uncover patterns that make it easy to build performant 

apps. 

Project: Restaurant Reviews App—Stage Three 

In this Nanodegree program, you will build a Restaurant Reviews App. To do this, you will incrementally 
convert a static webpage to a mobile-ready web application in three stages. In the final stage, Stage Three, 
you will advance the project from Stage Two. You will implement login and review submission logic on the 
client side, add search capability to the database so that users can store and look at reviews, and leverage 
offline capabilities so that users will be able write a review offline or mark a review or restaurant as a 
favorite while offline, defer it, and have it sent to the server when it's back online.